Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to electronic circuits and, more particularly, to devices comprising a processor and an embedded secure element. The present disclosure more particularly applies to controlling the authenticity of all or part of the instructions contained in the processor at the starting of the device.
Description of the Related Art
Many electronic devices, for example, cell phones, electronic keys (dongles), etc., are equipped with microprocessors for processing data and executing various applications. Among such applications, some are now associated with operations requiring preserving the security of the exchanged data, for example, payment, access control, and other operations.
More significant devices, for example, computers, video decoding boxes (Set Top Box), etc., comprise trusted platform modules (TPM) which enable protection of the content of instruction memories and in particular checking that a code or program to be executed has not been corrupted. Such modules are absent from less elaborate devices such as, for example, cell phones, electronic keys, and connected objects (connected watch, access dongle, etc.).
Electronic devices, even if they comprise no secure platform module, are however more and more often equipped with embedded secure elements, which actually are integrated circuits representing the security functions of microcircuit cards (smartcard, SIM, etc.). For example, such secure elements contain the microcircuit card emulation application which provides the security authentication service for payment, access control, and other operations.